1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, a computer-readable storage medium storing a program and an image processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, a multi-core processor has been developed. The multi-core processor is composed of a plurality of arithmetic units (hereinafter referred to as cores), such as processor cores, wherein the arithmetic units are integrated in one package. The multi-core processor disperses the processing among the cores to be processed parallelly, and thereby improves the processing performance thereof. In particular, it is suggested to speedup the print processing of an image forming apparatus, such as a MFP (multi function printer) and a printer, by assigning each processing to each core to execute parallel processing by using the multi-core processor.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-87137 discloses an image forming apparatus which performs the parallel processing of rendering processing (rasterization processing) of generating rendering data on the basis of intermediate language data with a plurality of cores.
However, the image forming apparatus described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-87137 performs the analysis processing of generating the intermediate language data with one core. Consequently, the other cores are to be in the state of waiting until the generation of the intermediate language data is completed, causing a case where the plurality of cores cannot be utilized effectively.
Accordingly, performing of the analysis processing parallelly with the plurality of cores can be considered. The analysis processing is the processing of analyzing data in the form of a page description language (hereinafter referred to as PDL) in the page unit and thereby generating intermediate language data.
When the analysis processing is performed with the plurality of cores, intermediate language data for pages according to the number of cores is generated. Consequently it is conceived that a memory capacity necessary for storing the intermediate language data becomes larger.
However, the adoption of a large-capacity memory and the expansion of a memory result in a cost increase of the image forming apparatus.
In order to supplement the memory capacity, the following method can be considered, that is, a storage device (for example, a hard disk drive) that is to use inexpensive in the cost with respect to the storage capacity thereof as compared to that of the memory, and to store the generated intermediate language data is saved in the storage device. However, the saving processing is an interrupt processing irrelevant to image formation, and causes the processing speed of the image forming apparatus to decrease. In addition, because the writing/reading speed of such a storage device is very slow comparing to that of the memory, the writing/reading of data requires great time. Hence, causing the processing speed of the image forming apparatus to decrease even more.
Therefore, it is conceived that a structure for effectively utilizing the memory is required in order to perform analysis processing parallelly with a plurality of cores without causing any cost increases and any decreases in processing speed of an image forming apparatus.